Application of time resolved emission techniques within the failure analysis flow

As the number of transistors and metal layers increases, traditional fault isolation techniques are less successful in exactly isolating the failing net or transistor to allow physical failure analysis. One tool to minimize the gap between global fault isolation – by means of emission microscopy or laser based techniques (TIVA, OBIRCH) – and physical root cause analysis is Time Resolved Emission (TRE). This paper presents two case studies illustrating the application of TRE within the failure analysis flow to generate a reasonable physical failure hypothesis.